


Magical Games and Sports Throuought the Ages

by OlderShouldKnowBetter



Series: Pride & Scorpius-verse [4]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-26
Updated: 2018-05-03
Packaged: 2019-04-28 07:04:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 5,587
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14443965
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OlderShouldKnowBetter/pseuds/OlderShouldKnowBetter
Summary: A companion volume to Quidditch throughout the ages which details different and varied magical games.





	1. Introduction

**Author's Note:**

> All the names you may recognise within the chapters of this story belong to a very rich woman who lets us play with her characters due to, from what I can only guess, is the kindness of her heart.

**Chapter 1: Introduction**

 

 

There have been many and varied magical games and pastimes throughout the ages and not just the ever popular Quidditch.

 

Even though it is the most popular and well known magical game, I shall not be covering Quidditch within the pages you now hold because anything that I may have to say has probably already been said – and almost certainly better – in the pages of Quidditch throughout the Ages. I thoroughly recommend the book to any lover of magical games and in my own humble way, I am trying, with this work, to provide what I hope will be a companion volume.

 

Quidditch owes its longevity and elevation above all other magical games to many factors, but probably the most important being that it is just plainly fun to watch. I know that this may date this work, but everyone will attest to that fact who was witness to the game between Germany and Ireland that, as I write this introduction, was only a few months ago. The skills of the beaters (a position close to my heart) on both sides were spectacular and that last goal save … so amazing, and was the difference between the win and the loss. That people want to be spectators of a game who are not directly involved in it, does much to elevate a pastime from being ‘merely’ a diversion into a sport.

 

There are other factors of course, of what makes something a ‘sport’. One could talk about fitness, or it taking place outdoors or many other things, but in my experience the main thing that elevates Quidditch above all of the other various magical games that have existed throughout the ages, is its ability to make one desirable to members of the opposite sex (and sometimes the same sex). The reader may think me being flippant, but I think there is far more to it than should be dismissed out of hand. The sex drive is one of the strongest there is and when it is coupled with a game, then it must propel it ever upwards.

 

I must say that the single game I played for Ravenclaw House whilst I was at school did wonders for my self-esteem and I do believe my desirability towards the opposite sex. Indeed I know that it did lead me – albeit in an oblique and elaborate way – to going out with and eventually marrying the wonderful and dearest, Mrs Better.

 

But that is the point, as youths we start to pay and observe the game and during our impressionable teen years the striking figures of the Quidditch players as they stride the halls of Hogwarts leave a lasting impression. So much so that both my daughter and my youngest son have adorned their walls with posters of the young heartthrob and newest chaser of the Kenmare Kestrels – the hunky and adorable Dale O’Ferguson (one of them I fear is in for disappointment, but even those tireless investigative journalists of the Witch Weekly have not yet ascertained into which camp he falls).

 

Because our society is so ruthlessly unbiased across racial and sexual bounds - due to one’s ability at magic being entirely divorced from any such factors - it has meant that historically every and all games derived by wizards and witches have been open to either gender. Not for us the Muggle notion of a male-league or that such-and-such is only for girls. No, one’s position and suitability for the Quidditch pitch say, is based solely upon one’s talent. I was reserve beater for four years whilst at school and even though in my solitary representative game I had laid a most impressive bludger shot (if I do say so myself) across the path of the opposition seeker causing him to miss his easy catch and set up our eventual catch of the snitch and hence our win. Even with all of that I was the reserve beater because Suzie McClintough was far superior to me and I only ever got to play that one game because she was serving out detention at the time (for what I cannot, in all good conscience divulge here).

 

There have been some games and pastimes historically that have been more appealing towards one sex than the other, but it has been largely due to the nature of the difference in the proclivities of either sex rather than either one being excluded. My darling wife, Atalotofthingsis, pointed out to me, when I showed her some of the more obscure games that I’d uncovered, that they were only played by men because women weren’t stupid enough to participate in them. Reviewing said games, I could only but concur as you my readers shall see when you read about ‘Bonk the Conk’ and others of its ilk.

 

So Quidditch got this huge leg-up and left so many others as mere footnotes in History – quite literally as this work will show. One big for-instance that has not been forgotten, but has certainly been sidelined is the game of Gobstones. Almost certainly due to the fact that no one whatsoever has ever, ever looked desirable with a huge squirt of foul smelling gunk on their face from a gobstone. It is surprising to me that this game should have survived the rigors of time to last into the modern age, but it did and as such  will get its own chapter.

 

We will discover in these pages the earliest games, games adapted from those of Muggles and many more. Before I finish this introduction I’d like to thank a couple of people whose assistance was invaluable in the research that went into this work.

 

The first is Olive Wood of the Department of Magical Games and Sports. She has been a delight for a researcher such as myself and has allowed me unparalleled access to the department files. She is the wife of the ex-keeper of Puddlemere united and now their coach, Oliver Wood. You might be amused that Oliver married an Olive, but apparently they were set up by friends as a joke, but in a turnabout, hit it off so well that they’ve never looked back. They didn’t want to break their luck (such superstitious sportspeople at heart they are) that they named their only daughter Olivia and from what I’ve seen of the young girl, is a promising keeper cut from the same mould as her father.

 

The second I'd like to thank is Draco Malfoy who also allowed me access to his extensive family library. The records contained therein, outlining the pureblood families and the games and pastimes that occupied that section of Wizarding society, are to be found no where else. I was also entertained by his young son, who played many various wizarding board games with me; again, a collection the likes of which is unlikely to be found anywhere else and I found it to be very comprehensive. For their help and patience with this old researcher, I’d like to dedicate this book to Scorpius Malfoy – a young man with, I think, a bright future.

 

 


	2. The Oldest Magical Games

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In this chapter we look at the oldest games in which magic was used.

**Chapter 2: The Oldest Magical Games**

 

 

The oldest magical games must of course be muggle ones.

 

In the times before wands were even thought of and wand lore was unknown, we were all muggles as such. There was no wizard society and the ones with the potential for magic were distributed throughout the population. I always wonder just how powerful those first wizards must have been to perform any magic at all let alone some of the feats they did without wands.

 

But even weaker wizards can perform wandless magic at opportune times throughout their lives. It can occur, as we all will no doubt remember from our childhoods, at times of high stress or intense concentration or dread or even great joy. The thing is, that all of these emotional states and more can occur during games and sport so it is no wonder that some of the first reports of magic were recorded after witnessing the events of certain games.

 

In ancient Egypt they made their statues out of basalt, but wrote upon paper – it is why precious few of their documents remain but there are plenty of Egyptian monuments. The Babylonians, on the other hand, carved their statues from calcite and limestone, but they wrote on clay and baked them hard – hence there are fewer Babylonian monuments left but there are whole libraries of these clay ‘books’. So we have to go to Babylonian and Sumerian sources instead of Egyptian ones for detailed reports of magic occurring during the playing of games.

 

In these massive cashes of clay tablets are many references to early magics.

 

Everyone will no doubt remember the name of Sargon - Sargon the Sorcerer - who actually became king due to his magical talent. There are certainly enough references to him, but more apropos to the interest of this work, there are numerous mentions of magic occurring during games.

 

One of my favourites speaks of a child who was ‘favoured by the gods’ as he played what we now refer to as the Royal Game of Ur. What would occur was that he would throw the tetrahedral dice to determine how many squares his pieces would advance, but then ‘the pieces would move upon the board through no human agency, the gods themselves moved the pieces as they wished.’  From perusal of the text, 'as they wished', being a way of saying that the moves were sometimes as they should have been and sometimes contra-wise to how the dice actually rolled.

 

As news of what he did got out, he was quickly snapped up by the priests of Ur and housed within a temple complex. Visitors would come to the temple with petitions for the gods and - upon a sufficient donation to the god’s agents upon the earth first of course – would be allowed to play a game against the child. Depending upon the outcome of the game, thus went the outcome of the petition. The child grew up and grew old apparently, housed within the temple and on a pretty good wicket - playing games all his life.

 

Another ancient ‘sport’ was that of hunting and there are many references to magic or miracles happening during the hunt. One particular one that cannot be discounted as hyperbole or coincidence occurred when a nobleman found himself out of position during a hunt for wild Aurochs. He’d galloped ahead of the main party and was stranded out in front when a herd of Aurochs burst out of the nearby forest and swept down upon him. Directly in their path and caught completely unawares, he should have been trampled underfoot, but in a ‘miracle of the gods’, he levitated twenty feet into the air until the herd had passed and it was safe for him to float back to the earth.

 

There are many such accounts of wandless magic occurring during the passion one feels playing games, but as I mentioned before, these must really be thought of as Muggle games, not wizarding ones. Yes they are instances of magic occurring during games and sport, but they are not magical games as such. A lot of wizarding games have been based or inspired by Muggle ones over the course of the years, as we shall see when we get to the chapter on board games. But for the first truly wizarding games we must look ahead till later, once wand lore is more widely used and known and wizard society had become established.

 


	3. The First and Worst Magical Game

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In this chapter we are shown evidence for what was probably one of the oldest wizard 'games' and almost certainly the most shameful.

**Chapter 3: The First and Worst Magical Game**

 

 

At the very beginning of Wizard culture and society, we do find the first evidence of games and sports whose origins can be attributed solely to wizards, but it is not to our credit the nature of first game we actually find.

 

To our shame the first wizarding ‘games’ were concerned with Muggle baiting.

 

A similar cause for the origins of the first Wizarding games can be seen in the origins of the first Muggle sports.  They were off-shoots and ritualised versions of everyday activities: hunting as a sport was a ritualised version of the everyday struggle for food; boxing and athletics and horse/chariot racing were less fatal and more codified versions of their martial counterparts.

 

So to it was with wizards. Everyone is tempted upon first preforming magic to make a game of ‘look what I can do,’ especially amongst one’s peers where everyone wants to be seen as special. But there is a darker side to it that some fall into; the temptation is too great for some of the more obnoxious youths to taunt or play tricks upon those normal kids who now seem to be beneath these 'now mighty wizards', and sad to say some adults do not grow out of the despicable behaviour of their youth. Unfortunately for some, there is a very short path from simply doing it to making a game of it.

 

It is no wonder to this chronicler, based upon the evidence that I have seen, that a version of ‘The Statute against Under-Aged Wizardry’ is one of our oldest laws. I will not detail here some of the more extreme cases that I’ve uncovered in my researchers. Mostly because I don’t want to horrify my readership (especially not this early in my work), but also because we must ask ourselves where ‘making a game of something’ ends and where plain vindictiveness and torture begin.

 

This is where I would leave the subject under normal circumstances, the incidents of Muggle baiting are very unsophisticated, rudimentary 'games' and I’m only including them for completeness, except that I have uncovered startling new evidence that Muggle Baiting may have indeed been made into a sport. And by sport, I mean to say that it had a codified set of rules and was actually ‘played’ as a sport; so as distasteful as the subject may be, I must include it as being a legitimate (though horrible) wizard game.

 

We must fast forward hundreds of years from our early society to find any evidence that a game was made of it. In those centuries the whole notion of Muggle Baiting had been condemned and vilified, not only because of its innate cruelty, but also because in operation it often contravened the International Statute of Secrecy. So as wizarding coalesced into a more stable organisation and the Statute of Secrecy was passed, the practice of Muggle Baiting was made illegal and punishable by incarceration. You could no longer confound someone and steal their cattle, nor could you magically intimidate Muggle folk, nor even were petty harassment or persecution allowed. So as happens when you make anything illegal that some people still want to do, it served to drive it underground.

 

During the course of my researches, I have uncovered evidence that some of the noble, pureblood families made a sport of Muggle baiting; with rules, penalties and rewards. Whilst I was receiving my education at Hogwarts, I had to research Muggle baiting for an assignment for my History of Magic class. The Ministry has extensive records and I found listed reports of the crime for centuries, with what seemed to me to be peculiar details. There were quite comprehensive records kept of actual times and dates of each reported case of Muggle baiting – far more than for other crimes of greater or lesser severity - but there were only sketchy details of whom had perpetrated the act. Every now and then a name would be attached to an incident and on the rarer occasion there would even be a conviction, but mostly each record had no more information than ‘Muggle baiting’ and a date.

 

I thought nothing more of it until my researches took me to Malfoy manor. As I mentioned in my introduction, Mr Draco Malfoy has been very gracious in allowing me access to his family’s extensive library. I was researching what games were actually being played, as distinct from those that merely existed, by going through the bound and collected correspondence of the family members of the early twentieth century. I came across a letter which had some eerie parallels to what I remembered from my earlier researches on the subject. With the permission of Draco Malfoy, I reprint the pertinent section here:-

<i>“…Did you hear about Biffy? </i>{the author is almost certainly referring to Bifune McNair} <i>Only went and got himself caught didn’t he, doing you-know-what to a you-know-what. As he’s now banged up and what with old Rookers</i> {Horgath Rookwood the Second}<i> getting a slap across the knuckles and loosing ten points for his fam (sic). – It looks like it’s down to us two for the cup…”</i>

 

The letter was from Lycoris Black, dated August 1920, and was sent to Abraxas Malfoy. The information in it stirred a memory, and double checking with the records in the Ministry, in that year Bifune McNair was given a sentence of one month in Azkaban for Muggle baiting and Horgath Rookwood the second was fined One Hundred Galleons for the same. So there must have been some competition for Muggle baiting between at least some of the ‘Noble’ and Pureblood families in regards to Muggle baiting with penalties for being caught (loss of ten points) and for being imprisoned (expulsion from that year’s ‘game’). Further digging in the family archives uncovered a picture taken at that year’s annual New Year’s Ball, in which a very disgruntled Abraxas Malfoy is seen handing over a bronze cup to a grinning Lycoris Black. Clearly seen written upon the cup are the words, ‘Charitable acts.’ A search of the manor and consultation with Mr Malfoy, revealed nothing of the cup. To whom it was last awarded and where it now resides is lost to history, and with it also a shameful chapter in Magical sports and games.

 


	4. Muggle games with a magical twist.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In this chapter we see how some muggle games have been given a magical twist.

**Chapter 4: Muggle games with a magical twist.**

 

 

I touched upon the subject briefly in the last chapter and now that the unpleasant aspects of what some could consider to be legitimate wizard games is behind us, let us move onto more enjoyable concerns.

 

It truly is a marvellous thing living amongst Muggles as a Muggle and then suddenly discovering just what you are capable of. Everything in your life is seen through a new lens; you see how magic can and will improve what you love. You don’t lose what you loved before and if it was games and sport then there is an understandable desire to improve it with magic.

 

So there are naturally a whole slew of games throughout the ages which were originally Muggle games but have been amplified and expanded by the use of magic. These sports were largely developed in the Muggle-born and half-blood sections of our community, because the initial origins of these games lie with Muggles. The scions of the pureblood families were exposed to precious little of Muggle society so they didn’t know much about various Muggle sports or have the desire for them that those born and raised as Muggles do. And in one very real way, who can blame them when there is a perfectly fantastic game at their doorstep in Quidditch.

 

The Shamen of Northern North America have a version of Lacrosse that is played upon the Winter Solstice high in the mountains. They abide by the statute of secrecy, but, just as happens here in England, the higher-ups in government are privy to the secret. In traditional North American Indian society that meant the village and tribal chiefs. They would gather to witness the ‘Game of the Sun,' congregating together in peace, despite any inter-tribal rivalry or fighting. At such gatherings, sometimes even deals or lasting peace could be brokered, but, as is the nature of humans, sometimes meeting your rivals/enemies would only make matters worse.

 

The Lacrosse ball would be soaked in pitch and lit, but enchantments upon it would ensure that it would not be consumed by the flames. Likewise the heads of the Lacrosse rackets would also be similarly enchanted. Everything else – the players, their clothing, etc – would be just as susceptible to fire as they ever were. The field never needed protecting as, being the dead of winter, it was usually calf high in snow. The players would struggle through the snow, hurling around the flaming ball; metaphorically 'saving the sun from being extinguished by the cold of winter'. There is an isolated mountain field, high up in the Canadian end of the Rockies where the game is still played to this day.

 

Apparently, similar games, not strictly Lacrosse, were played at various points all the way down the Rockies, but most have fallen into abeyance as the tribes were decimated by the white settlers. But once all along that great mountain range the New Year was stewarded in by young men and women hurling around a symbolic ball of fire.

 

Not so ancient and not so mystical are the more recent wizardised versions of muggle sports. People forget that the codifications of most rules of play are really only a recent invention, mere centuries old. The Muggles for instance play a football game called rugby, but the nature of the adoption of the game and the rules becoming widespread has been a matter of historical accident; they might easily have been playing Harrow instead. In the Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries football was a loose collection of, quite often drunken, men getting together for a bit of a barney and the actual presence of a football was perhaps a secondary concern. The goals were often at either end of a village, though that’s not nearly so bizarre as it sounds when one remembers that a lot of villages of that time were constructed around a common green.

 

During my researches I found a few wizards who said that their grandfathers remembered playing a similar game with fast and loose rules, but with a magical twist. An area safe from Muggles would be found and enchantments placed upon it such that a magical field would encase the actual field of play. The ball would be charmed so that you could kick it softly, but forceful kicks would produce prodigious flights of the ball. The rules were similar to what would one day become soccer, but with the ability of the dome surrounding the field to be able to ricochet the ball back into the field of play there was no out of bounds and the game played very much like modern Ice Hockey does. The game was once wide spread but it began to disappear from the wizarding world with the advent of the easy availability of more affordable brooms. It is gaining a resurgence in some of the mountainous areas of Europe – namely the Pyrenees, the Alps and the Carpathians – where they play it in remote mountain valleys.

 

There is a version of cricket that the Australian School of Wizardry practice out on the Hay plain in western New South Wales. It has a similar set up as for magical football, but completely opposite in use. The magical field is set up over the pitch; it allows the ball through but not the players; as soon as the ball passes through the field it is magically returned to one of the Umpires and the batting team receive a six or a four, depending if it hit the ground before it went out or not. The fielding team can levitate themselves or fly around the field (some of the fielders are on brooms) in efforts to catch the magically enhanced ball. Now that might seem like it’s a bit unfair, but the pitch can be between one and two kilometres round. I have heard of a similar American version of Baseball, but was unable to find much collaborating evidence.

 

And that’s about it for magical versions of Muggle games. Apart from a few isolated instances, most wizard sports inspired by Muggle ones have died out and fallen to that juggernaut which is Quidditch.

 


	5. Chapter 5: Games of chance involving dice

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In chapter five we see the problems surrounding the use of dice, as they pertain to gambling.

**Chapter 5: Games of chance involving dice**

 

 

Games of chance

 

Very early on in wizarding society it was seen that games of luck favoured the wizard, because wizards could make their own luck of course, by magic.

 

Never is this more true than in games involving dice. It is far more problematical to affect the play of cards – though it can be done – but the flight of dice can be so easily nudged to fall in a desirable way. So much so, that in the few wizard only casinos dotted around the world, you will find no games involving dice.

 

This is not only due to overt magic, from the casting of spells and such, but also that random, wandless magic that can creep out from a person with sufficient magical talent. All muggle casinos around the world are monitored by the various Wizard Ministries as a matter of course. The major areas for gambling, like Monarco and Las Vegas for instance, have their own wizarding detachments to prevent wizards from winning large amounts of money at the gaming tables.

 

It is of course because bankers aren’t stupid. Muggle money can easily be exchanged for wizard currency and to have every wizard at a whim being able to win vast sums would destabilise the economy. So no easy winnings from charming cards or the like, anti-magic charms and magic suppression fields are in effect in every legitimate gambling establishment the world over.

 

But these measures are not effective against that wandless magic that wizards can produce given enough incentive to do so. And gambling/gaming do produce some of the perfect conditions to induce a wizard to preform wandless magic: high stress, desiring a particular outcome, emotions running high. It is not even a deliberate attempt to cheat; most of this wandless magic is done quite unconsciously. It doesn’t always happen, but it does enough to skew the probabilities. If a wizard is found to be winning inconsistently at a dice game, they will be told to collect their winnings and will be escorted from the premises. Much like Muggles would, if they were to be found ‘counting cards’.

 

For those who don’t know this is an ingenious way Muggles have devised to cheat at cards. They actually try to remember what cards have been played, so that they will ‘know’ what’s likely to turn up in subsequent hands – from a deck consisting of six or seven individual decks shuffled together! What Muggles can achieve without magic can be quite impressive when given a clear incentive.

 

There are some ways around this. The best way is to construct dice from some substance that is either inherently unmagical or so magical that low powered spells will not work upon it. Most wizard dice are now days made from dragon bone. Some of the older dice, still to be found in certain collections, were made from the bones of giants, but this practice has been outlawed for centuries.

 

Even then, the flight of even the most magic resistant substances can still be affected. The practice of shaking the dice in a cup and dumping it upon a table actually skews the result in even more favourable outcomes for wizards than just throwing the dice through the air. So that is why in the wizard gambling establishments you will find no Craps tables, nor for very similar reasons will you find Roulette Tables either. It is usually card games or nothing in the wizarding casinos and the hapless wizard that thinks he or she has suddenly found an easy way to get rich in Muggle ones will soon find themselves on the wrong side of the law. If they are lucky enough to be caught by them before they are caught by the Casino security.

 


	6. Board Games involving dice

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the sixth chapter we see the problems surrounding the use of dice, as they pertain to board games.

**Chapter 6: Board Games involving dice**

 

The best solution in board-games is not to use die at all, hence the popularity with wizards of board games predicated upon skill, rather than luck. Still chess and gobstones are not for everyone, sometimes all you want is a relaxing game that anyone can play and have an equal chance at regardless of a lack of years of learnt skills. Using dice to randomise the outcomes of moves is a tried and true method and can be made to work, even in a magic rich invironment.

 

The major thing that has been done to increase randomization in wizard board-games is to only use one dice. I had to learn a bit of Muggle probability mathematics to understand why, but it is obvious once you know. Employing one dice you have exactly the same chance to have any side come up – one in six - it’s completely random and completely even. Using two dice starts to skew the probabilities because there are numbers upon the faces of the dice and the result of the dice throw is the addition of the numbers upon the two upturned faces. This wouldn’t be a problem if the dice just had nonsense symbols upon the faces, and indeed there are some wizarding games that employ such dice; there have not been that many historically, but more are being developed due to the influence and popularity of the new wave of Muggle board-games. So with a pair of dice, there should be 36 different combinations of the way two dice fall, but because you add the two faces of the dice together there are only eleven – the numbers of two through to twelve. So it is far easier to get a seven (there a twelve different ways using two dice) than it is to get eleven (two ways). Using polyhedral dice only increases the randomization of a single dice's output - one roll generating ten or twelve or even twenty different outcomes instead of the mere six of normal dice.

 

Coupled with using one dice is the design of the games. Most wizard board-games that employ dice do so to randomise the nature of the moves in games where it doesn’t matter so much if you get a higher number or lower, just that there is a randomisation. Epitomising this is the most successful of wizard invented board-games: Slides and Staircases. The exact originator has been lost to history, but was surely someone in one of the old wizarding families. It is a game based upon sneaking around an old mansion or castle, but there are various secret passageways that can either hinder or help you upon your journey: a secret staircase may lead you upwards to the goal, while a hidden trapdoor may slide you down to almost where you started from.

 

It became very popular, so much so that it escaped its narrow confines amongst the pureblood families and made its way out into the rest of the wizarding population. It was modified to appeal more to the common wizard and witch – most of the population had no real experience with staircases in their homes, let alone secret passages. So a few quick changes later and staircases became ladders and slides became snakes (preying upon a common bias against the predominantly Slytherin purebloods). Thus snakes and ladders was born and it proved to be so popular that it crossed over into Muggle society; though the Muggle versions are not nearly so interesting as the wizard ones.

 

I was lucky enough to be allowed access to the Malfoy family collection of board games when researching this work. Their extensive collection was begun by Arcturus Malfoy who was a keen gamester. He added considerable funds into the family’s coffers by using his magic to influence the outcome of games of chance. Not possible of course in Europe, he did so in the American so-called ‘wild west’ – staying outside of and ahead of magical jurisdiction, but often only just. He was eventually caught by magical officials, luckily enough, just before he was due to be caught by Muggle ones who wouldn’t have been as lenient. He was deported with bans never to return, but only after he had collected a large fortune. His legacy (he was childless) was the east wing of the family home and the impressive library and games collection housed therein.

 

I spent quite a few pleasant afternoons ensconced in the board-games room with the young son of the household, Scorpius Malfoy. They have many different versions of Snakes and Ladders and just as many of the older Slides and Stairways. They are indeed fun games to play, far more so than their mundane counterparts. In the printed, non-magical versions each beneficial staircase and each hindering snake is known; especially that one awful sanke that takes your from the high nineties right back almost to the start. Not so the magical versions, in them the snakes and the slides move around, as do the ladders and the staircases; so that you don’t know exactly where you will be deposited from one round to the next.

 

The Malfoy's also have in their possession some of the other, older wizard board-games that were devised but never took off in a big way. I found it remarkable that they had so many and in such good condition. It is difficult to find many of these games today, because not a lot were made and many were destroyed by angry parents and even angry players. Those who have seen the Muggle moving pictures, Jumanji or Zarthura will understand why.


End file.
